Launching Wednesday, a new Sunnyvale-based storage startup called Springpath is flaunting its solution to the oncoming data deluge: a software-designed storage strategy that promises to allow customers to more efficiently store data in their server infrastructure without having to buy more hard drives.

Springpath, like other software-defined-storage startups like Primary Data and Qumulo, believes that modern-day data centers for the likes of a typical business (not the Googles or Facebooks of the world) are “highly fragmented” and littered with too many hardware appliances from multiple vendors, explained Springpath CEO and CTO Mallik Mahalingam. Compounding the problem is that each appliance has its own management plane that conflicts with the other devices, he said.

What Springpath wants to do is unify all of the storage in a company’s data centers through the use of software, but what makes it different is that the underlying Springpath software “runs on top of commodity servers” as opposed to the storage hard drives themselves, said Mahalingam.

“We are a full storage system,” said Mahalingam. “We don’t depend on any external storage [device].”

The Springpath team said that modern-day commodity servers contain enough storage built inside them that they can be used as both suppliers of compute and storage. The startup’s founders, who came from [company]VMware[/company] (Mahalingam said he is the inventor of the VxLan virtual networking technology), think that their proprietary software coupled together a server will be more efficient than storage arrays whose technology might be decades old.

At the heart of Springpath’s technology is its distributed file system called HALO, which the company spent the past three years developing from the ground up.

With the the HALO architecture, users should be able to link up all of their servers and access the types of data management services that you’d come to expect from other software-defined storage startups. These services include data caching, intelligently distributing the data across the devices for better performance and data de-duplication, which essentially removes duplicate copies of data that are hogging the system.

By putting a company’s data in one single device that does both compute and storage, Mahalingam explained that this could significantly save a company money in buying excess storage drives.

Of course, having both storage and compute bundled in one appliance could pose problems if the device shuts down for some reason, taking both the computing and data down with it. However, Springpath’s software apparently takes in account failover, so if one device goes down, another one should come back online.

If you want to use Springpath’s software in your data center to connect to the public cloud, as of now the startup only supports vCloud Air and “anything that’s coupled with the VMware environment,” but plans are to eventually support other public cloud environments, Mahalingam said.

Springpath also doesn’t support Hadoop, so big data aficionados who love the framework may be out of luck for the time being. Mahalingam said Hadoop integration may be on the horizon.

The Sunnyvale startup currently has $34 million in total funding from investors including Sequoia Capital, NEA and Redpoint.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2015/02/18/springpath-software-defined-storage/feed/1Why doesn’t the WhatsApp web browser version work for iOS users?http://gigaom.com/2015/01/21/why-doesnt-the-whatsapp-web-browser-version-work-for-ios-users/
http://gigaom.com/2015/01/21/why-doesnt-the-whatsapp-web-browser-version-work-for-ios-users/#commentsWed, 21 Jan 2015 20:02:12 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=908529The popular international messaging app WhatsApp has unveiled a web browser-based version of its service. In a blog post, the company announced that millions of WhatsApp users will now be able to chat on browsers (and their computers!) instead of just their mobile apps.

“Millions of” being the operative word. Millions of users aren’t “all users.” According to the logos on the desktop client homepage, the web application is only compatible with WhatsApp user accounts from Android, Windows and weirdly enough, Blackberry. A WhatsApp spokesperson later told me that Nokia S60 is also in the list.

For now iPhone owners won’t have access to WhatsApp’s desktop client. The spokesperson said it’s not available on iOS because “Apple has no background multi-tasking and no proper push technology. So it is a bad user experience on iOS.” WhatsApp told The Verge that an iOS compatible version is coming, but “the timeframe is unclear.”

Furthermore, it looks like WhatsApp’s desktop web browser version only works on Google Chrome. When I attempted to access it from Safari, I received this message:

WhatsApp told me that Google Chrome’s push notification system is ideal for the product, which is why the company picked it. It seems strange for an app with all the power of Facebook behind it to release its web browser before it’s compatible with iPhone and Safari.

WhatsApp told me, “It is a bad user experience on iOS and won’t get better until Apple addresses those [previously mentioned] things. So we didn’t want to keep this from other users to wait for Apple.”

This story has been updated with information from a WhatsApp spokesperson.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2015/01/21/why-doesnt-the-whatsapp-web-browser-version-work-for-ios-users/feed/77Facebook courts developers to compete with rivals in Asiahttp://gigaom.com/2014/12/01/facebook-courts-developers-to-compete-with-rivals-in-asia/
Tue, 02 Dec 2014 00:20:40 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=897331It’s no secret that Facebook is courting app developers. But where it’s doing so is a little more surprising.

On Monday, Facebook’s mobile app server company Parse released statistics on its biggest user growth. Its adoption in Asia has skyrocketed; the company said that in the first half of 2014, the apps in Asia using Parse grew 90 percent (the company wouldn’t release specific user numbers though). Likewise, the number of apps in this area that use all of Parse’s products — analytics, push notifications, and server space — also grew 90 percent.

Furthermore, of the top fifteen countries with the biggest Parse userbase, six of them are from Asia — India, Japan, Australia, China, Taiwan, and Korea.

Here’s why that’s exciting for Facebook. The company wasn’t able to dominate as a social network in Asia, with the likes of WeChat, Line, KakaoTalk, and other chatting applications taking its place. But if Facebook can sneak inside the Asian mobile app economy, powering said apps with free server space — and potentially connecting them to its mobile advertising network — Facebook can take a cut of the ad revenue and gathers information on app users.

Facebook wants a foothold in the huge Asian consumer market, and this may be its in.

]]>Ruling gives irked Bitcasa users more time to move their datahttp://gigaom.com/2014/11/20/ruling-gives-irked-bitcasa-users-more-time-to-move-their-data/
http://gigaom.com/2014/11/20/ruling-gives-irked-bitcasa-users-more-time-to-move-their-data/#commentsThu, 20 Nov 2014 21:12:48 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=890666If you want to hold onto your Bitcasa infinite-drive data long enough to move it somewhere else, you’ll need to pay Bitcasa $99 for an additional month, according to an order from U.S. District Judge William Alsup on Wednesday.

The case boiled down to plaintiff Shawn Romack’s claim that the three-week timeframe Bitcasa gave users to move or lose their stuff wasn’t enough time.

[pullquote person=”court filing” attribution=”court filing”]A court-ordered extension was “likely to push Bitcasa into bankruptcy within weeks, if not days.” [/pullquote]

Bitcasa cannot be happy about this given that it claimed it already took a big financial hit due to a court order earlier this week that pushed back the data-deletion date for just a few days. As part of its revamped storage infrastructure, the startup wanted to move all of its customer data to new [company]Amazon[/company] Web Services storage servers, but because of the court order, it had to pay to maintain its old servers in addition to the new infrastructure.

While most of the financial details were redacted in the public court documents, The Recorder, a legal newspaper, was at the hearing and reported that Judge Alsup said Bitcasa was losing $67,000 a day because of the court order.

According to that document, complying with the court order and losing money each day was seriously jeopardizing the company; a court-ordered extension was “likely to push Bitcasa into bankruptcy within weeks, if not days,” the document stated.

To top it all off, the startup said in the filing that it has “no new venture funding in sight.”

At the root of these problems is the financial outlay Bitcasa has to make to rent its AWS cloud servers while also keeping its previous unlimited-storage plans running on other infrastructure, the company wrote in a court filing that outlined its case.

A couple issues emerged over time with Bitcasa’s two key-selling points: a low-cost unlimited-storage plan for $99 a year and its “zero-knowledge” encryption technology “which makes it impossible for Bitcasa or third parties to know what particular data resides in a particular user’s account,” the document stated.

As the amount of user data piled up on Bitcasa’s rented AWS servers, the company realized that its encryption technology made it impossible to determine whether that data actually belonged to active users as opposed to former customers. Essentially, the company had to rent out AWS servers in order to maintain data it had no idea was linked to paying customer accounts.

From the filing:
[blockquote person=”court document” attribution=”court document”]Like the overwhelming majority of start-ups in Silicon Valley, however, Bitcasa’s vision soon collided with reality, and in particular, the very real costs of storing its users’ data. Several problems emerged. First was the problem of “garbage collection.” By design, the company’s advanced encryption software gave it no visibility into the files owned by any particular users. Unfortunately, this left the company with no way to know if particular data was owned by any active account and, thus, no reliable way to delete orphan data. Thus, over time, the company was paying to host an increasing amount of junk data.
[/blockquote]

Couple that dilemma with the fact that Bitcasa suspected that some infinite-drive customers were flooding the service with “staggering volumes of data,” it’s clear Bitcasa’s AWS storage costs have been enormous and not sustainable for the startup to operate without a significant business overhaul. The company claimed that “one Infinite user, in particular, used Bitcasa to store 82TB of data—enough space for 28.7 million photos or nearly 42,000 movies—singlehandedly costing Bitcasa approximately [Redacted] or more per month in server storage fees.”

In October, Bitcasa told its users that the company was upgrading its infrastructure and they needed to migrate their data to new servers. Doing so would basically allow Bitcasa to start afresh and wipe out all that excess data it had to pay for on the old servers.

Now that Bitcasa doesn’t have to maintain those old servers, the company will save some cash, but as the court documents show, it’s going to take a lot more for the startup to regain the momentum it once had when it launched.

Regarding the news, Bitcasa provided Gigaom the following statement via email:
[blockquote person=”Bitcasa” attribution=”Bitcasa”]Yesterday, U.S. District Judge William Alsup rejected Plaintiff Shawn Romack’s request to extend the initial temporary restraining order entered on November 13, 2014. We are pleased by the positive outcome and continue to believe that the suit is without merit.

In our legal papers, we highlighted the risks of incurring an ongoing cost of $67,000 per day to comply with the court order — an extraordinary burden for any venture-backed company. Now alleviated from that uncertainty, Bitcasa can move forward with its planned transition, which sets the stage for profitable growth. Bitcasa’s management team and investors, which include Horizon Ventures and Pelion Venture Partners, continue to believe in and support the company’s vision. [/blockquote]
]]>

http://gigaom.com/2014/11/20/ruling-gives-irked-bitcasa-users-more-time-to-move-their-data/feed/7Illumio, exiting stealth, aims to secure both your data center and the cloudhttp://gigaom.com/2014/10/22/illumio-exiting-stealth-aims-to-secure-both-your-data-center-and-the-cloud/
Wed, 22 Oct 2014 13:00:48 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=882589After a not-so-quiet 22 months, security startup Illumio plans to come out of stealth and detail how its technology works on Wednesday.

Illumio’s take on securing the data center as well as cloud infrastructure makes for something more than providing a modern-day firewall for the cloud, said Andrew Rubin, Illumio’s CEO and founder.

The startup’s security technology is like an access management tool for enterprise workloads. Whereas a startup like Conjur provides access management for companies with a lot of cloud infrastructure so that users can make sure that only the right person can get to a particular server or directory, Illumio applies that same idea to individual workloads; users can run Illumio to ensure that the right workloads only get transmitted to the appropriate servers.

Users can load up software agents called virtual enforcement nodes onto their server’s operating systems — whether they are on the public or private cloud or on bare-metal machines — so that the agents essentially cover all workloads sent to and from those servers, explained Rubin.

Illumio Chart

These agents receive their protection duties from a policy compute engine that users can setup with how they they want the workloads to be delivered. If at any point users need to spin up more servers, the policy compute engine can scale accordingly and allocate the appropriate workloads to the new servers.

“We can build a picture of what that environment looks like and how the pieces communicate with each other,” said Rubin. “You write your policy from the compute platform and provision it to the individual workloads.”

This type of workload security system can help ensure that an application running in a developer environment never gets put on a production server. It also allows companies paranoid of moving to the cloud to set up security policy in their own environments so that the policy can be carried to public cloud infrastructure, said Rubin.

Illumio also has a visualization tool

Part of the way Illumio developed its technology involved meeting and talking with companies about modern security issues they were seeing even before Illumio had a core product to showcase.

“Despite being in stealth, we actually engaged with over a hundred enterprises,” said Alan Cohen, Illumio’s chief commercial officer.

The startup counts [company]Morgan Stanley[/company], [company]Plantronics[/company] and [company]Yahoo[/company] among its customers and has raised $42.5 million from Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Formation 8, Data Collective, Marc Benioff and Jerry Yang.

]]>Having raised an unexpected $4M, record-breaker Protonet ends crowdfunding drive (for now)http://gigaom.com/2014/06/27/having-raised-an-unexpected-4m-record-breaker-protonet-ends-crowdfunding-drive-for-now/
http://gigaom.com/2014/06/27/having-raised-an-unexpected-4m-record-breaker-protonet-ends-crowdfunding-drive-for-now/#commentsFri, 27 Jun 2014 08:37:12 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=853725The Hamburg-based secure server firm Protonet made history earlier this month when it raised $1 million through crowdfunding in a mere 89 minutes, smashing the Veronica Mars movie’s 4-hour record for hitting the same milestone. Now Protonet has closed its crowdfunding round at €3 million ($4.1 million).

That’s not bad for a funding round that originally sought €500,000, then upped the limit to €1.5 million once the Protonet team realized people really liked the idea of its Maya server for small teams that want to collaborate securely. Then it raised the limit again but, according to business development chief Philipp Baumgaertel, “obviously at some point we had to say this is enough money for us to last the next 12 months.”

“We were getting lots of calls and emails from hundreds of people saying ‘We want to invest, please come on, re-open’,” Baumgaertel said of the repeated decision to raise the round’s limit. “We thought if there’s such a desire from the crowd, why should we shut the door?”

One reason to shut the door eventually, of course, was that the campaign was being conducted on Seedmatch, meaning investors get a cut of Protonet’s future profits and stand to benefit if and when the company eventually goes public (they don’t get voting rights, though). Upping the limit on the round didn’t dilute what the round’s early investors had signed up for, but from the main shareholders’ perspective the party had to reach an end at some point – for now, at least.

“We’d rather optimize those €3 million as well as we can and then open another round,” Baumgaertel said. Protonet previously crowdfunded €200,000 through Seedmatch at the start of 2013, then picked up $1.2 million from local angel backers.

The fact that the company is now swimming in much more cash than it anticipated will lead to swifter internationalization of its product. As Baumgaertel explained, the original plan was to start pushing beyond the German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) around the middle of next year. “Now we can already take the first steps in this direction,” he said.

That means becoming active further afield in Europe, so as to learn more about customer support, import and export and so on. Then onwards to the U.S., which Protonet hopes will provide a springboard for the rest of the world.

Perhaps you can expect to see Protonet’s orange box and its secure collaboration software in operation near you over the coming years.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2014/06/27/having-raised-an-unexpected-4m-record-breaker-protonet-ends-crowdfunding-drive-for-now/feed/2Secure server firm Protonet crowdfunds $1M in just 89 minuteshttp://gigaom.com/2014/06/04/secure-server-firm-protonet-crowdfunds-1m-in-just-an-hour-and-a-half/
http://gigaom.com/2014/06/04/secure-server-firm-protonet-crowdfunds-1m-in-just-an-hour-and-a-half/#commentsWed, 04 Jun 2014 12:53:04 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=846999Looks like there’s a new record for the fastest crowdfunding of $1 million, and it ain’t for a movie this time – it’s for a server company that’s trying to wean businesses off the public cloud.

I wrote about Protonet, a German startup that makes secure servers for small teams, last July. It was just after the Snowden revelations began, and the company had duly picked up a $1.2 million investment to help it attract business customers who were suddenly extra-cautious around U.S.-hosted cloud services. There’s no sales pitch like being told your current supplier could be forced to give up your sensitive information to foreign spies.

Now Protonet is onto the third version of its orange box. This one’s called Maya and it’s aimed at individuals and small teams of up to 10 people. It will cost €1,199 ($1,633) and will feature 8GB of RAM and an Intel(s intc) Celeron processor. Like its bigger siblings, it will run the Protonet SOUL version of Linux, which comes with equivalents to Dropbox, Skype(s msft), WeTransfer and so on, all running from the server rather than some data center somewhere.

Having previously raised €200,000 through the profit-share crowdfunding site Seedmatch, Protonet returned to the same platform on Wednesday morning with a more ambitious target of €1 million. A mere 89 minutes later, the campaign had cleared €750,000 ($1.02 million). At the time of writing, shortly after lunch, Protonet is 90 percent of the way toward its funding limit, having picked up 543 new investors.

This certainly isn’t the record for the biggest ever crowdfunding pledge — that one went to Canonical’s Ubuntu Edge campaign, whose potential backers pledged $12.8 million, but that still fell well short of the Edge’s target and no one actually had to give anything as a result.

It is almost certainly a new record for the fastest-ever crowdfunding of $1 million, though. As far as I can tell, the previous record was for the Veronica Mars movie, which took just over 4 hours to reach the same milestone on Kickstarter.

Protonet marketing chief Thomas Reimers told me on Wednesday that the money will be used to start production of the Maya server and boost the company’s marketing efforts – so far it’s only been selling to Germany, and a bit to German-speaking Austria and Switzerland, but in the next half year or so it intends to try breaking into the English-speaking world.

The firm will continue assembling its servers in its offices, which now require expansion for that purpose. “We have a very good and reliable supply chain with partners around Hamburg,” Reimers said.

This story was updated at 6.30am PT to note that the record was set in 89 minutes rather than 90 — a small difference, but worth noting.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2014/06/04/secure-server-firm-protonet-crowdfunds-1m-in-just-an-hour-and-a-half/feed/4ARM server pioneer Calxeda shuts its office after running out of cashhttp://gigaom.com/2013/12/19/arm-server-pioneer-calxeda-plans-restructuring-after-running-out-of-cash/
http://gigaom.com/2013/12/19/arm-server-pioneer-calxeda-plans-restructuring-after-running-out-of-cash/#commentsThu, 19 Dec 2013 21:54:12 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=786791Calxeda, a company that was founded in 2008 to build out ARM-based servers for the web world says it is in the process of restructuring its business after apparently running out of funding. A story by All Things D says that the company is shutting down.

The company clarified that it has closed its office and sent most of its 130 employees home with the exception of a few people to continue to support customers. The product remains available and will be sold/serviced by whatever company takes shape after the restructuring, which will determine what happens to the assets and people. It added:

The market is just materializing, and its a shame that we simply ran out of money at this time. The financing we thought we had lined up disappeared quite suddenly and we ran out of runway to put another deal together.

Calxeda aimed to meet the needs of the webscale market as demand for low-power servers that could perform smaller workloads became interesting to web giants like Google(s goog) and Facebook(s fb). As recently as October it added a Facebook infrastructure executive to its board. Unlike SeaMicro, which was purchased by AMD, Calxeda decided that ARM cores, as opposed to X86 machines were the optimal way to go. At the time of the founding this was a somewhat crazy idea, but soon companies like Marvell and Applied Micro started talking up ARM in the server market as well.

Calxeda, had a deal with HP to build 32-bit servers, but the market for 32-bit machines was limited in the enterprise. It has sold products into the storage market, but struggled on the older-generation 32-bit ARM cores. The plan was always to put out 64-bit ARM-based boxes when those cores were available from ARM. That’s happening this year, but it seems Calxeda couldn’t keep up with its costs against the relatively thin demand for the 32-bit gear.

The company put out a statement that read:

Over the last few years, Calxeda has been a driving force in the industry for low power server processors and fabric-based computing. The concept of a fabric of ARM-based servers challenging the industry giants was not on anyone’s radar screen when we started this journey. Now it is a foregone conclusion that the industry will be transformed forever.

Now it’s time to tackle the next challenge. Carrying the load of industry pioneer has exceeded our ability to continue to operate as we had envisioned. We wanted to let you know that Calxeda has begun a restructuring process. During this process, we remain committed to our customer’s success with ECX-2000 projects that are now underway.

The statement discusses a restructuring and hints at some sort of reformation, but after burning through $100 million it’s unlikely that this is going to be a Phoenix-like rebirth as opposed to someone picking through the ashes of a fire sale.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2013/12/19/arm-server-pioneer-calxeda-plans-restructuring-after-running-out-of-cash/feed/6Google may be making its own custom server chips. It shouldhttp://gigaom.com/2013/12/12/google-may-be-making-its-own-custom-server-chips-it-should/
http://gigaom.com/2013/12/12/google-may-be-making-its-own-custom-server-chips-it-should/#commentsThu, 12 Dec 2013 23:05:20 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=731171A thinly sourced report from Bloomberg Thursday speculated that Google is building its own custom server chips using the ARM architecture. This isn’t a new rumor, but something that has popped up every now and again since Google purchased ARM-based server chip design firm Agnilux back in 2010. I’ve tried to chase it down at varying intervals over the years.

After all, Google makes its own switches (although it did buy third-party chips for the boxes) and isn’t afraid to develop its own gear to optimize on performance and cost. When you make money delivering websites, it only makes sense that you are going to make the process as efficient as possible, and building servers designed to handle the relatively small workload of serving web pages would be an excellent use case for the lower-power ARM-based chips. Google has several other large-scale workloads where a custom processor could also make sense.

What’s changed in the last few years is the economics and power of ARM processors. As more companies are building out ARM-based systems designed for servers, the cost of building custom-systems on a chip has dropped. ARM is a modular architecture as opposed to one where aspects like networking are integrated into the chip. Thus building a custom chip using ARM and other elements doesn’t cost as much as it once did.

I even said this would come to pass in a story written this summer, when I quoted AMD’s Andrew Feldman discussing how large webscale companies would soon be building their own custom chips. From that story:

Andrew Feldman, GM and corporate VP at AMD, explained this idea in a series of conversations with me over the last few weeks in which he estimated that one could build an entirely custom chip using the ARM architecture in about 18 months for about $30 million. He compared this to the three or four-year time frame and $300 million to $400 million in development costs required to build an x86-based server chip….

… in the ARM world things are different. Because any number of players can license an ARM core, each one is looking for points of differentiation outside the core (some with architecture licenses are looking to tweak the core itself) and can make chips with better I/O or specific workload accelerators. An example here is Calxeda, which is using an ARM core in highly dense servers but has also built a custom interconnect to send information rapidly between its hundreds of ARM cores.

So when the mega data centers look at the opportunities presented by ARM, it’s not as simple as buying a piece of silicon from Marvell or Applied Micro, or a Calxeda box from HP. According to Feldman, web giants are looking at co-developing ARM-based chips that will take advantage of the greater levels of customization offered outside of the CPU so they can optimize for their own applications’ needs.

So if Google is indeed considering custom ARM-based chips for certain workloads, that makes sense. For an investment in the few tens of millions it might be able to optimize workloads that could help it speed up its service or lower the cost of providing it. With a more modular and licensable IP core, if ARM can do the job, why not take a look at using it? When reached via email today, Feldman said he still believe that for Google it’s not a question of if, but of when, although he suspects we’d see chips coming out in the next three to five years. However, to make that possibility it would have to start designing today.

This might be a blow to Intel, which currently counts Google as its fifth largest customer according to Bloomberg, but my hunch is that Google would still use some x86-based chips in its hardware where that makes sense. This isn’t the religious war between ARM and Intel so much as its rationalization of the cost of computing.

When you get a large enough number of low-cost machines all doing the same thing — as you see in cloud computing or these large webscale players — placing all your bets on general-purpose computing is like depending on a Major League pitcher to also be a damn fine cleanup hitter.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2013/12/12/google-may-be-making-its-own-custom-server-chips-it-should/feed/8Want to let users test-drive your server apps? Devops outfit ComodIT has a button for you.http://gigaom.com/2013/05/15/want-to-let-users-test-drive-your-server-apps-it-automation-outfit-comodit-has-a-button-for-you/
http://gigaom.com/2013/05/15/want-to-let-users-test-drive-your-server-apps-it-automation-outfit-comodit-has-a-button-for-you/#commentsWed, 15 May 2013 13:00:56 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=645458ComodIT, the Belgian cloud management startup that’s targeting enterprise devops with its automated virtual machine provisioning and configuration product, just released a rather handy tool for developers and users of server-based applications. It’s a “direct install” button that developers can put on their website, allowing the user to either easily install the app on their existing on-premise or cloud server, or to test-drive it for free in a cloud-based ComodIT VM.

The feature can already be seen in ComodIT’s own application store and on the website of lifestreaming platform Storytlr, but is now available for anyone to use. In effect, it makes the installation of server-based apps a lot more like that of mobile apps – an almost one-click experience that even allows users to “share” the apps in question on Facebook(s fb) and Twitter.

“You can embed the application – just copy and paste [a few lines of Javascript] and put it on your website. You add the direct install blue button and you allow anyone to install that application directly from your website,” ComodIT CEO Daniel Bartz told me.

Bartz suggested this approach would overcome the traditional open-source server software installation experience, which sometimes involves multi-page tutorials. The test-drive aspect is pretty neat too: when that option is chosen, ComodIT basically installs and runs the app for a free 100 minutes in an Amazon(s amzn) EC2 micro instance.

It makes marketing a bit easier for developers and of course it steers people towards ComodIT’s own distribution platform and wider services. As Bartz explained:

“When you click ‘direct install’, in fact you connect to ComodIT and you create a server on which you will install an OS and all the things that have to be done for installing applications. We’re automating the manual procedure – we do this like we do for any other pieces of ComodIT following the devops approach.

“Behind the scenes, we’re activating recipes for deployments. Within your ComodIT account you have access to all the recipes and descriptions that you usually have. The next step is deploying the application not only for testing but also for production, with all the ComodIT features like autoscaling and autobackup.

“We bring the user onto the platform and, as we have a business model based on the number of servers you’re managing with ComodIT, if you have more users installing the application through the direct install button, we’re a happy provider.”

It’s a smart idea and one that could give ComodIT a boost as it competes with the likes of Opscode and Puppet Labs (see disclosure) for devops’ attention.

ComodIT was a finalist in our Structure:Europe LaunchPad competition last year. This year’s Structure:Europe will take place in London from 18-19 September and, if you can’t wait until then for a high-level get-together around cloud automation and other such topics, don’t forget that our San Francisco Structure event is coming up on 19-20 June, too.

Disclosure:Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.